Hi folks. Which Graphics card should I go for: MSI GeForce GTX 650Ti Power Edition OC 1024MB GDDR5 £121 GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 650 Ti OC 2048MB GDDR5 £143 Gigabyte HD7850 2GB OC £161 Gigabyte GV-N660OC 2GB £171 I'd ideally like a Geforce card ,so i can have phsx. I normally don't spend this much on a graphics card, but the disappointing performance of the lower priced nvida cards put me off. I would like a quieter cooler design as my last reference cooler was mega loud and I had to replace it. I'm leaning towards 2gb ram because i think the high texture packs might need it and it might future proof it a bit. The lower memory bandwidth of the Geforce 650ti also kind of puts me of getting that particular card too BTW, I'm limited to around 150watts graphics card TDP as I've only got a 420watt psu and I don't want to buy another one. Budget: As little as possible. Anyway, my TDP requiments kind of limit my options. Usage: Gaming (High Texture packs and icEnhancer),1080p video playback, video encoding and video editing. special requirements: Quiet Cooler Design. Overclocking: Prefer not to bother, but may do if it's worth it. My Specs: 1680 x 1050 monitor (will probally upgrade this shortly) Geforce 250GTS 512MB 256GB SSD 512GB HDD AMD Phenomen II X2 550BE
With a 150W TDP limit I would stick with the 650ti 2GB as you would have 150W usage from the PCIe slot and the single 6pin connector, and it has similar/better performance to the 560ti and 6870, which are still nice cards. The 2GB VRAM would also help, I tried icEnhancer on GTA4 on my 1GB 6870 and it slowed the game down a lot! Plus in games like Skyrim there is deffo a difference when using a lot of mods. So, the 650ti would be the way to go dude! I still think a 420 watt PSU is a little low though. And wouldn't a modern GPU bottleneck an X2? Maybe it would be worth upgrading CPU/Mobo too? Not that educated about the performance of AMD CPUs. Hope I helped lol.
Where did you pull the 150W number from? Are you going for SLI or do you have dual socket CPUs or what?
7850. Linear price + linear performance increase. The 7850 is faster than the 650Ti by a good amount.
If you're going stock vs stock then the 660 is faster than the 7850 and the 650Ti shouldn't even enter the conversation. However, if you plan to overclock then the 7850 will easily trounce a 660. Imagine my 7850 chip which is designed to run at 860MHz/4800MHz is running at 1120Mhz/5500MHz on stock voltages. People who are overvolting their cards are getting north of 1300Mhz on the core, a 50% overclock. It would obviously be disingenuous to guarantee an overclock, but there is hardly anyone whose card refuses to OC to at least 1050MHz. Power wise, neither of these cards is going anywhere near the 150W. The worst case scenario for a 7850 is about 125W and the 660 is from a more efficient architecture in Kepler so I expect it would be less. I can't honestly see why someone would choose a 660 over a 7850 unless they were absolutely against overclocking.
TDP Not my A%S if that's what your asking. I got the figure from http://www.hwcompare.com: It's the TDP of a geforce gts 250 512MB graphics card. All the cards I have selected have a lower rated TDP because I worry that my psu Won't be able to handle it. Don't really want to spend £50 on a brand name PSU as well. Oh and thank you everyone for your help. Kind of leaning towards the geforce 660 ATM. I feel a bit iffy spending so much when my last graphics card only cost £80 years ago.
Overclocking Thank you guys for all the help and advice you have given me. To tell the truth I'm leaning towards the geforce 660 because of PHSX. I thought some of the effects where quite nice in Batman arkham asylum Does the Geforce 660 auto overclock? Doesn't overclocking void the warranty? Did try overclocking The graphics card i have now, but got very disappointing results. not my as* if that's what your asking. It's the TDP rating of the geforce gts250 according to Hwcompare.com.
The question only you can answer is is it worth having a lower performance card in order to use PhysX on a couple of games per year? If the games you plan to play use it then go for the 660. Also consider that the 660 isn't a powerhouse so you will probably be able to use PhysX on low or medium before it begins to cripple your framerate. No card overclocks itself, but some custom graphics cards from MSi, Asus, Sapphire, eVGA et cetera have higher clocks than normal. I don't think it affects your warranty unless you run your cards so far out of spec that you damage it. The problem with OCing is that performance has to scale with it otherwise it is just a higher number for a higher number's sake. My 7850 has a 30% overclock and the performance scales 25-30% on most games. The 6000 cards from AMD didn't have good OC scaling, so even a high OC wouldn't gain too much performance. One thing to note with the 660 is that the voltage is locked, so you will not be able to overvolt your card. My 7850 runs at 1.12GHz with 1.08V (stock) but people have been going towards 1.3GHz with 1.25-1.3V, remember that stock speed is 860MHz.
Cheap power supplies are like mechanical terrorists in that when they kill themselves, they take with them a lot of innocents. If you value your equipment at all, you should be prepared to put down some money on a decent PSU now rather than being left ruing it later. Something like a OCZ ZS Series 550W for under £50 is not a bad place to start. In your situation, a decent power supply takes precedent over any card. You wouldn't want a crummy PSU to put your new graphics card or any other components into early retirement.
